Urban Malaise

Blogging is a hard habit to keep up, especially because I don't want to write arbitrary posts with borrowed images and nothing interesting to say. I still have a wealth of photos from Indonesia and Thailand that I haven't even mentioned, and the problem is the pace of city living. No matter how much of a whirlwind of sensory delights my travels are, once I return to a job and an everyday life, the memories are dulled and any attempt at storytelling becomes rote. I'm going to line up a couple of posts about my Asian jaunts for the next week or so, since I will be spending my birthday week back up in Sydney. I have some restaurant, hostel, temple names noted down in my travel journal but I want to try and recreate is the atmosphere of the places I visited, and now I am not working I have the opportunity to sit down and do this.

I began my second year visa in October, actually while I was in Thailand, and as I've mentioned I faced a bit of a dilemma. I'd missed the opportunity to visit Europe over Christmas, but I'd lost interest in Australia. Transferring to Melbourne was a start, but I still found myself melancholic and unsure of what I was missing. Working in a bar I hate and living in a neighbourhood distanced from the backpacker community has exacerbated this feeling, but ultimately made me think about what I want from my time here in Australia. With that in mind, my plan is to quit this city at the end of January and embark on a little adventure.

My travel priorities are and have always been: meeting interesting, international people; learning about new cultures and/or communities; being close to nature. That last one might not gel with my "city collector" attitude, but what I've come to realise is that it's not about the size of a town so much as how you connect with it. Previously I've enjoyed walking the streets of cities, people-watching and considering the psychogeography of a place, how architecture, climate and topography intersect with the people living there to create a unique culture from one city to the next. Now I want to take this to a smaller scale, and in Australia it's not just the residents of these towns that are so interesting, it's also the other travellers. The backpacker community in this country is so interconnected and I can't wait to get out there and build even bigger networks.